


it's rotten, the apple of our youth

by hollowedrxbcage



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Multi, Other, makes absolutely no sense just so that's clear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 20:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16248944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollowedrxbcage/pseuds/hollowedrxbcage
Summary: Here is the answer, now. Here is the explanation, now; it pulls Lukesh’s ribs apart.Lukesh is not the sky - there is no death to bargain with - she runs.





	it's rotten, the apple of our youth

**Author's Note:**

> title from [x](https://ragewrites.tumblr.com/post/175820812159/neon-gods-prompts-week-12)

Keone is a vicious promise of a city, Lukesh thinks, and dreams of it anyways: the sound of a sea breaking, brine-touched mouths, the gleam of bared blades. Keone is the worst city he will ever witness - and witness is the right word, witness like a crime - but he calls it home.

Listen, maybe the story always starts like this, but it’s meant to.

Keone is a wish snapped like a throat, and Lukesh will never (can never) forget this. Some part of him is perpetually at rest here, feet wandered into saltwater and Keone as unbearably tangible.

 

 

This is not an explanation, but Lukesh’s breath shakes in her lungs.

Xander’s eyes are pale, moon-like; Lukesh thinks of books, of sweeping fingertips over words, of how a poet says _the moon is a sickle_ and it becomes a truth. Light splays against Xander’s skin, cold pooling in the hollow of her clavicle, and the blue curtains brush against Lukesh’s hair.

“Alexander,” Lukesh says like a half-formed thought.

“Lukesh,” Xander says, like a taunt.

Luk’s fingers are wrapped around Xander’s wrist, nails touching half-moons into her skin - the space between a radius and an ulna, the way the solidity almost dips down to yield. Lukesh thinks about breathing. Something curls up Xander’s lips, but her eyes don’t shift.

When Lukesh was six - saltwater caught in her throat and air like prashad - she’d touched every synonym for _salvation_ and named Xander each of them. This is not an answer, either, but she forgets the question.

It is effortless to open her mouth against Xander’s. It’s gravitational.

 

 

Keone says _trouble_ like Lukesh could splice his tongue apart on its syllables, the sea-salt of them.

 

 

There are pigeon blood rubies cupped in Xander’s hands, as though they could spill their red over his bared palms. Something wicked twists his mouth, eyes ghost-bright. Xander always runs like this - a balancing act tossing between life and death - and Luk’s thoughts are soft and formless here.

“Sometimes,” Lukesh says, “I think you have a death wish.” This is the space between what they want to say and what their tongue will move around.

Xander disappears the rubies, just smears of crimson tucked away, fingers moving like dark blurs, “Only sometimes?” His eyes are a blade, a knife sliding against a fish’s scales and peeling up. And - it’s not funny.

Lukesh laughs.

 

 

 _Pause_ :

There is something that matters here, but nothing that Luk will tell.

Ekta skins an apple in spirals and then halves it, licking the spilled juice off her fingertips and offering a half to Lukesh. The white of the apple’s flesh is something bared, nude. Sunlight breaks against Ekta’s shoulders like tangibility. The blade is bright-hot; it doesn’t shake in her hands.

Lukesh takes the piece and bites into it; doesn’t pay any mind to the sweetness running at the corners of his mouth, seeping out at every puncture of the fruit. Shadows streak underneath Ekta’s eyes, but Lukesh looks at her hands and remembers definitions for _indomitable._

“Tell me about your day,” Lukesh says like a slip of a thought.

Ekta eats neatly, clean, “I talked to a friend, and I made a decision. Tell me about yours, Aadhira.”

“Well, everyone in my life is cryptic and it’s _awful_.”

Ekta runs fingers through Luk’s hair, easy, and he leans into it, smiling.

The day is shining, vase-like blue and sunbright; the next morning - foamed hemlock pools at Ekta’s mouth, her eyes blank. They knock her door down to find her shoulders limp. This is nothing Luk will tell.

 _Resume_.

 

 

Keone’s touch seals itself underneath Lukesh’s skin - tender, ragged, and cruel.

 

 

They are seventeen and Xander’s eyes are feral with showmanship, hands caught lifted in the air, lightning bisecting the sky with white-hot. Lukesh’s breath fragments itself.

When she was younger, her fingertips spread over ancient books, there was a myth: a man and the sky; the sky and a man. A man died and the sky bargained itself away just for him, pieced itself apart like a butcher shop under death’s glass-dark eyes, learned to die just for this man.

Xander falls.

Here is the answer, now. Here is the explanation, now; it pulls Lukesh’s ribs apart.

Lukesh is not the sky - there is no death to bargain with - she runs.

 

 

The roads are dirt and stone cobbled together; the roads follow each other, all the same, and Lukesh’s feet ache. Every place is another scrap of a memory blurred together. They are halfway desperate, searching for something still poised on their tongue, unbearable.

 

 

 _Something_ is defined by Silvera, sometime between too soon and too late.

Moonlight drips across Luk’s skin; he comes to the city in night, coins shining cold on her palms and lightning still dangling through his spine. Silvera’s fingertips gather the liquid shadows collected between Lukesh’s bones - eyes made kind, nothing that can be given voice to.

Listen, this isn’t a story anymore; it’s an apology.

 

 

The boat rocks underneath Lukesh’s feet, and she wants to splinter herself apart. Water is silver-touched, twisting under moonlight, and Luk’s mouth is transmuted to something sharp - something knifelike - as she glances across the crowd.

There are two figures as silhouettes at the end of the ship, lights cutting sharp; she is made helpless when she looks. She wants to count the kindnesses of Aleta’s vertebrae, the patiences of Vihaan’s shoulders, to trace nails across the dips and curves of their fingertips like a sanctification.

She has never known how to love without this contraction of her bound ribs, her lungs futile against oxygen. Here, Lukesh is nothing better than she has been.

Aleta and Vihaan approach, and her fingers curve, tightening, around the bared fishbone of a railing.

Lukesh doesn't look away from the two - she can’t.

“We were looking for you,” Vihaan says. The sentence sounds half-formed, as though something should follow it. Vihaan’s breath is a held thought, and his hand careless copper circling a glass stem.

She says, “I’m sorry,” and doesn’t know what for.

“Don’t be,” says Aleta, their chapped mouth soft, “We’ve found you now.”

 

 

Silvera is a liminal space, perched birdlike between the fall of Lukesh’s wingbones.

The Mir has scales of balance for eyes. A man says, “ _Danger_ ,” and another, “ _Death_ ,” and Aleta, nothing at all.

This is a decision. This is something final. This is an apology.

 

 

They are twenty, and there is blood spattered onto their hands; there is something metallic and inescapable swelling over their mouth. Mir Kadir is only a lifeless figure draped across ground, now, and Lukesh’s breath is a shudder fit into their throat.

They say, to the corpse, “I’m sorry,” and sunlight is draining away from the crimson of the drawing room.

It doesn’t change anything.

The air tastes like death, like the promise before a rot, like red, and Lukesh’s tongue skates over it. Their hands remember the cool grip of a dropped dagger, the warmth of seeping life, and the open slash of the Mir’s jugular - it becomes a brand. _Murderer_ , it names, almost gentle.

This is nothing just, and the sun sinks behind Lukesh.

They run.

 

 

And it’s a small town, far from the sea, when someone asks Lukesh for his name.

He hesitates, then answers, his mouth curling into something unfamiliar, “Kaher. Kaher Rytic.”


End file.
